Halfway through Tallulah, an unwieldy but affecting showcase for Ellen Page and Allison Janney, Lu (Page), a drifter suddenly confronted by an enormous responsibility stares up at blue sky above Washington Square Park and muses about gravity. What if it just stopped? What if we left these earthly bounds and floated off into the ether? It’s not a suicidal fantasy on Lu’s part, though circumstances have landed her in a terrible spot. She just wants to be free.
Written and directed by Sian Heder, an Orange is the New Black staff writer making her feature debut, Tallulah is a movie about the burdens of motherhood, of young adulthood, and of being a woman period. Heder and her cast work hard to make those themes land through the drama, which insistently finds connections between strangers of different generations who are thrown into the same crisis. Yet it’s also the type of movie that turns Lu’s dream of weightlessness into a clunky visual motif, not trusting us to understand characters that it imagines so thoroughly.
The too-muchness signaled by that metaphor carries over into the plotting, which survives a few hiccups and major contrivances to find its emotional center. First seen dashing away from a roadside bar with stolen liquor, the free-spirited Lu lives in a van with her boyfriend Nico (Evan Jonigkeit) and dreams idly of climbing the Himalayas, which she’s pretty sure are in India. The couple has spent two years eating out of dumpsters and begging truckers for shower tickets; Nico wants to settle down and Lu wants to continue down the open road.
Cue the cosmic record-scratch.
After Nico splits in the middle of the night, Lu drives to New York City in search of his mother, Margo (Janney), whom he intended to visit. Still penniless, Lu scavenges the halls of a fancy hotel for room service scraps, but winds up getting pulled into a situation that changes the course of her life. Mistaking her for housekeeping, Carolyn (Tammy Blanchard), a drunk, hapless trophy wife, ropes her into looking after her one-year-old daughter while she goes out on a date. Lu takes the assignment out of pity — as well as the piles of loose cash and jewelry in the room — but winds up taking the baby, too, when Carolyn comes back wasted and in no condition to care for her kid.